Marionette
by Eternally-Yours-24
Summary: Steven catches a terrifying glimpse of what's going on inside White Pearl's head.


White Pearl came to him twice, once on purpose, the second merely on accident…or so he thought.

She was just a broken, pitiful thing, but she elicited a sense of unease that Steven couldn't ignore. She had only one eye. It appeared not to blink at all, staring so listlessly that one might think it was also impaired in some way. Her face was marred with hairline cracks that branched out along the other eye, which was glazed over so that it appeared to not be there at all. A complaint smile was glued to her face, resembling what you might find drawn by a young child's hand.

Steven could sense something within her the moment she burst from the silvery bubble. She radiated an energy confined by a cage, screaming and clawing against the bars but still it could not be heard. This is what was causing him to shudder, and still would even when he was teleported to his mother's old palace. That life that was so hopelessly bottled up inside, yet so close that he felt he could simply reach out to grab its pleading hand. He wondered if the others could sense it too, though they probably couldn't.

"Pink Diamond, your presence is required," she recited. She didn't even move right; she only glided, as if she were something that ran off a battery.

The second time was something else entirely. Steven supposed he'd fallen asleep in that room, for he opened his eyes to find himself in a dark void similar to where he found Lapis Lazuli chained to her unstable fusion. These days Steven never could predict where his dreams might take him. It was endless, suffocating, bleak, and cold, so cold. It was echoing with the haunted ghosts of some terrible past. This was, he knew out of instinct, a very dreadful place indeed. Yet it hadn't always been this way.

The back of his neck prickled, a feeling that didn't just have to do with the chilling ice of the air. He was not alone. _She_ was there, crumpled in on herself like some animal found stunned in the road, as if her own weight was too much for her to carry. She was muttering to herself. Inaudible words, ones that she seemed to be repeating over and over like some scratched record. The faintness of her voice floated eerily around Steven, not just around him but _through_ him, one disturbing detail making goosebumps rise on his sticky arms. White Pearl was not _white._ Though this made his flesh crawl, he was not at all surprised. The aura that he felt when they first met was much stronger here, not having to struggle as much against the barrier it was trapped behind.

 _Pink._

He could sense it as much as he could see it. The bubblegum pink hues of her skin were like a living thing that coated his tongue with its rusty sweetness. She was rosy and glowing, free of that pale infection. When his numb legs took one hesitant step towards her, she abruptly turned as if startled, staring at him with two round, full eyes. Her face was flawless and pretty. "You," she gasped. Even her voice had changed, no longer bearing that unnatural robotic quality, but instead sounded somehow whimsical, colored with a vague accent.

"Pearl," he said hesitantly, though it felt wrong to assign that name to anyone but the Pearl he knew, who'd all but raised him. He held up a hand in offering. "I can…I can heal you."

" _No!"_ she wailed. She'd wrenched herself away from him although he'd made no real efforts to touch her. And then for one awful moment it wasn't her laying damned before him, but the memory of Jasper, with those jagged spikes poking grotesquely from her body. Steven had been forced to watch as her mind had been slowly frayed by corruption and he could do nothing about it. This only strengthened his desperation, wanting to save this clearly tortured being. "Please, just let me…"

"Stop! Leave me be! She'll hear you!"

Her pain came at him full force, heightened into a piercing glass shard by his empathic abilities. The bitter feel of hopelessness was running through his veins. He grit his teeth and stumbled back a bit, a hand clutching tightly at the hardness of his gem beneath his shirt. The fabric wrinkled in his fist.

"There's nothing you can do for me!" Pearl continued to cry, her words like stabbing deep into fresh knife wounds. "She will never let me go."

Later he would write it off to some trick of the light and his terrorized mindset, but then it seemed to him as if long, thin strings had been attached to her arms, her legs, wrapped tightly around the spindly limbs as she spoke. The restraints were merciless and inescapable. Then he blinked, the possible illusion vanishing, but it was something that would be engraved in his mind forever. A new presence came barreling in, and if Pearl's was warm and rich, this one was cold and metallic. White Diamond had found him. She had always been there, watching, amused until he had upset her delicate plaything.

A sharp tug ripped him away from Pearl, making him scream, afraid that he would be swept away by the Diamond's spell and become what Pearl had become; a twisted, perverse little puppet. That he too would soon be so consumed by it that the real him would be forced into the most hidden, dusty corners of his own consciousness, clinging to the scattered pieces that remained. Just like her.

"I'm sorry I failed you, My Diamond!" Pink Pearl screamed over the roar of the phantom wind. That was the last thing he heard before he awoke in front of White Diamond.

The redness of his own closed eyelids was assaulted by her brilliant glow. He forced them open, though they felt impossibly heavy. White Diamond towered over him. She gave him a dazzling smile as he struggled to sit up, shielding his eyes from the light as it scraped his irises with an electric pain. Despite her calmness there was something far less than benevolent in that luminescent face. Beside her stylish feet stood White Pearl, exaggeratingly obedient and molded into her usual pose, except a new sort of ardor was lurking in her one good eye.

"Hello, Starlight," White Diamond's sing-song voice purred, laced with carefully masked venom. She was furious. Steven still hadn't quite recovered, so feeling all that anger directed at him made him so light-headed and buzzing with overwhelm that he feared he might pass out.

"Poking around where you don't belong again, Pink? Well, no worries. It won't happen again."


End file.
